Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday October 26, 2011 @05:17PM
from the looking-with-new-eyes dept.

MrSeb writes "Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited — the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site — but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users. Mozilla might be readying a large-scale switch to Bing when its current contract with Google expires in November."

The point of it is diversification. Mozilla is still heavily dependent upon Google for revenue, and even with this switch that will remain the case, but it will somewhat lessen the need for Mozilla to keep in good with Google to keep the dollars flowing.

Also it gives those of us that avoid using Google an alternative that helps fund Mozilla.

As opposed to Google which is the main source of revenue for Mozilla. The point is that diversification is good, it was always somewhat of a risk to be getting that large a portion of total revenue from a competitor.

My guess is this is a shot across the bow of Google. Letting Google know that it's pretty easy for them to switch the default search traffic to Bing is just good business. I'm sure Microsoft is going to be bidding pretty heavily to get Firefox's search user base.

In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google. I suspect after this, the next contract renewal might be a higher number.

I think we're settling in to a browser renaissance here. With all the major browsers being mostly equivalent feature wise people will just choose what works best for them. I suspect we'll have a three way race for browser usage between Chrome, IE, and Firefox. I suspect the market share will level out, and there won't be a CLEAR winner like there was when IE6 dominated.

Even if Chrome gets market share Firefox will still have its place, and still be relevant.

How long did it take your astroturfing department to find a country that showed IE rising and Chrome falling? I can't find ANY other country that shows that - UK's trend of Chrome rising and all other browsers falling seems typical. There is a lot of variation between absolute marketshare, but the general trend of Chrome rising and all other browsers falling (except Opera, which has a loyal but tiny userbase, even in its native Norway) are quite similar with the exception of Germany.

Why does everyone have to immediately call troll these days? Germany is a good counter-example for the claim that the world follows what happens in the UK. I'd also generally consider Germany to be more of a trend-setter than the UK. And if you believe that, it's a clear example of how one small country does NOT typically set the trend for the world as the stats for Germany don't look like anything we're seeing globally.

In all, calm down. He made some good points if you actually follow the train of thought

You went trough all the countries, then followed up with how Opera has a tiny user base even in Norway... yet somehow completely missed Russia [statcounter.com]. Point is, the global trend isn't global, the different countries have their own distinct trends, that the UK is similar to the average doesn't mean much. Brazil seems to be absolutely in love with Chrome. In India Chrome is neck to neck with Firefox and both are going up in favour of IE. Chrome is gaining in Europe overall, but slowly with IE and Firefox battling fo

In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them.

Maybe. Or maybe it's going to piss them off when somebody they have had a business relationship with for years goes "hey, just because we have a deal and you give us tens of millions of dollars and like 90% of our revenue, we'll still find ways to make pretty much the same deal with somebody else at the same time."

In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google

It may be chump change for Google, but it is life and death for the Moz Foundation.

I must admit I haven't really used Bing much until I read this article. Just as a test today I set my default search engine to Bing and it's surprisingly decent! It's a very decent alternative to Google now. Seeing as Microsoft loses money [searchenginewatch.com] on search I don't mind using it either.

With Google being as big as it is, and having it's finger in EVERYTHING, makes me nervous. Having a viable alternative just serves to keep them honest.

I love google as a company. I love android, I love gmail, and I love google calendar. I use and heavily rely on all three.

However google's search engine as of recent is very disappointing, largely as a result of a few so called "fixes."

Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.

I've been finding that as of late, google appears to be omitting some kewords from my search. The page summary doesn't include some of the words, and worse is that when you go to the page, and hit ctrl-f, you can't even find one of the omitted keyword! Frustrating as hell.

The most annoying, is when you type a search term with google instant, and sometimes when you arrow back to inline edit your search while instant is coming up, or if you accidentally move the mouse over one of the search suggestions, it removes your original search and replaces it with one of the search suggestions, causing you to have to re-type the whole thing! And turning off google instant isn't a reliable solution, because when you lose the cookie, or move to a computer that doesn't have one, you have to go and turn it off again.

I've been using bing lately and thankfully it doesn't suffer from these problems. I'd like to go back to google, but until they can solve these problems I'll be using bing for a while.

Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.

Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?

Anyway, what makes moving away from Google surprisingly hard is that it really does learn from your search history (and probably all the other stuff that Google gathers on you) - in my case, at least, it consistently gives me better results, but only if I'm logged in. It probably helps that my primary email is GMail and my primary IM is GTalk, and, more recently, my primary social network is G+ - and I don't

Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?

Having to type double the characters is a pretty huge degradation in usability. Google seems also to be getting increasingly suspicious of human input, which will require more and more coded notation to override...until the search box simply isn't there one day.

Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?

Yes. I don't care when I know that I need the literal modifier when I'm initially typing the query. I DO care when I typed a reasonable query and Google does some dumb interpretation of it. With quotes, I now have to either switch to my mouse twice to insert the pair, or use a lot of arrow keys to move across the word. Either way is more annoying than using a single +.

I also don't like overloading the String operator with Literal functionality.

I just changed my home page from google to duckduckgo. It's been set to google for over a decade, but this shit with removing the + operator was the last straw. Some of the other stuff (like the black bar and the preview and moving the cache link to the stupid preview thing) was basically cosmetic, but doing away with the plus operator decreases the functionality of their core product. This has really created a lot of extra, stupid work for me (super frustrated that it was all because of the google+ crap).

You wouldn't believe how much I agree with you about Google's features being a seriously irritating downgrade. But switching to bing is like driving around in a dump truck because your car rattles a little bit...

I discovered Google early, and jumped on it instantly, converting everyone I knew. Google seriously raised the bar from the cespool of lousy search engines, and I'll be forever greatful for that.

However, google undeniably values quantity over quality, so they've serious deprioritized the sites you

Becoming the default search engine on a secondary version of another browser with a declining market share. Is MS trying to implode or are they just clueless?

Maybe MS is smart about the future, and TFS is wrong about the direction this points. Maybe its not about the future of Mozilla -- dumping Google -- but instead about the future of Microsoft's browser. Maybe after testing the water with "Firefox with Bing", MS just adopts that in place of IE. Given the plethora of devices with browser, Microsoft's wani

release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users.

Users can set whatever search engine they want, this has nothing to do with "Bing's abilities". The biggest income of browser developers comes from search sites paying to be default. In this case, Microsoft payed more than Google.

i've used mozilla stuff since 2002. i used mozilla then pheonix then firefox. i was around for the good and the bad but this tears it. seriously, it seems like 2011 is the year of bat shit crazy decisions over at mozilla. nay, 2011 is the year of bat shit crazy decisions at mozilla. all mozilla has done lately is follow everything chrome does and now this! what is this, google envy?

the people steering mozilla need a swift kick in the pants because they are acting like a drunken bard out on sunset boul

Firefox is suffering from a decline in market share, over fixable technical issues, massive memory leaks, and you spend your time making firefox with bing? Not to mention that the last few releases have been nothing but cheap knock offs of chrome. I want my browser back!

What kind of massive development effort do you think it takes for Mozilla to set the default search provider to Bing that it will literally take away from fixing "massive" memory leaks and "technical issues"? Should they just say to hell with it and take whatever scraps Google offers them and lay off half their developers because Google doesn't want to pay them much for the next contract?

You must live in some kind of utopian version of reality to think that they shouldn't have to run their organization like

Your experiences do not speak for everyone's. I do use Firefox 7, and occasionally test aurora (nightly). I have not had memory leaks until 6, now it takes over a gig of ram to display 5 tabs after a few days. It's also grown crashier, and the general quality is declining. I too, have used firefox since before it was called firefox, and I can say without a doubt that you're wrong. Either that, or you're not running a *nix based OS, where the memory leaks seem more prevalent.

The reason many Slashdot-readers might dislike Firefox usually has absolutely nothing to do with why normal people switch. Do you honestly think that memory leaks would make the average Joe switch to something else? No, it's because:

1) Chrome gets a LOT of advertising. It's on Google's front page, ads on web pages, included as "bonuses" for some software installs (like those pointless toolbars), etc.

2) Chrome has a simpler UI than Firefox somewhat. It's not "Traditional", but what do most people who are wil

If Microsoft did this and made a corporate friendly version, we'd be all over it. Give us something like FrontMotion and a lot of people would be happy. This is just the Bing crew paying Mozilla to produce a Bing enabled version.

You know why they're doing this, right? For years, the only thing that has really made Mozilla Corp. any money is their Google partnership. In fact, they got a little greedy over the years because of it, and have really whored Firefox out with lots of changes primarily to lure in people, and rushed out versions to look competitive with other browsers (sometimes even dropping features just to meet unnecessarily rushed release dates), to the point that they turned it into the same bloated mess which was the

"This is also the reason why Google is struggling in non-western world like China and Russia. They didn't get there by the time internet got wider usage, so they cannot get market share now." -- really? A company that doesn't like censoring and tried to find ways to not censor legally does not get common usage in a country that loves to censor? I'm talking a

Well, one thing I like about Bing is the bird's eye view maps. They're far more useful than Google's satellite view when I'm looking at large properties, or doing architecture models to scale. Guess that makes me an MS shill.

Actually, while I haven't seen any advantage in their search results the times I've used Bing, I have noticed their maps are frequently much better than Google's. How long exactly did it take Google to finally recognize, for example, that Louisville, Kentucky is a city and should have its name shown on the map? Many years IIRC. I constantly see blatant errors in Google Maps information, but sending in fixes never does any good. I've given up trying.

But when that competitor is Microsoft the metagame changes. MS is famous for doing a little of everything, so they're always Fourth in a market, trying to look like "underdogs" while they still have the fading WinOffice monopoly.

Nope, just when you use clearly prewritten content.Shilling on public websites is big business these days. Political parties do it, the Chinese Government does it, and I am sure whoever is paying you is doing it too.

I've been accused of shilling for very many companies just because I commented something positive about them

Since you pretty much only post positive stories about MS - nice, big, semi-articulate stories, as opposed to two sentence rants - yeah, you're a shill, and lying about it. Must be a sucky job, be paid to lie repeatedly.

Yes, let's. I'm a butt hair away from wiping Firefox from my life. Bing is junk that must be forced on people. We use Google because it works and always has. There is no reason to use Bing. Google may have some black marks on them but nothing compared to the declining Microsoft and their childish practices. There are some good people that work at Microsoft. Unfortunately they are hemmed in by the over riding crap ass government-like culture of isolated departments and divisions that is Microsoft. For all th

I don't get this. My Google-defaulted Mozilla makes it really easy to switch to Bing. It's right there in the pulldown list, which is way more than I can say for IE, which is supposed to make it easy to switch from the Bing default to another search engine, but which acutally puts you through some pretty tricky hoops to install another search engine from an MS website. When I tried it on a co-worker's machine, it wouldn't install (either because their IE version wasn't compatible or because the machine w

Changing the firefox search engine default via the pulldown only affects searches entered in the search bar... this version will use bing for searches entered into the address bar too. (which otherwise needs a change in about:config).

Considering that 96.42% of firefox users don't even know that about:config exists even if they wanted to change it back to google, there is a vague point.

(I won't even get into the amount of times I've boggled at people entering yahoo.co.jp into the search bar and th

Oh yeah, Microsoft having a monopoly on desktop computing and office suites is such an underpowered position to start from..

The real reason they're failing is because IE is still fucking lame. I prefer the IE6 UI over the crap that they have in 7 and up. And no, I don't use IE6.

I used to reorganise FFs toolbar to tidy it up. Chrome actually had things set up exactly the same as my FF custom arrangement by default, only without a search bar or menu to waste space. As soon as it had adblock, I was there.

I used to think that about IE9, then I had to travel using a small laptop (borderline netbook), a Celeron with 2GB RAM. Chrome is fast, IE9 takes forever to start and after a few tabs it make the whole computer unusable.

And now that the single most important missing feature has been added to Chrome (being able to right-click to select context menu items) they will pry this browser from my cold, dead hands!

Every move that Mozilla has made lately has done nothing but piss off their long-time users.

First it was not fixing the memory usage and performance problems that have plagued Firefox for years now. This is something that users keep begging Mozilla to fix, but it never happens. Firefox is always slower than Chrome, Safari, Opera and now even the more recent versions of IE!

Then there are the Firefox UI changes they've made with recent releases that only make it so much harder to use Firefox. Please bring bac

Why does Mozilla go out of their way to ignore their users? Why do they go out of their way to mess with these projects that don't actually fix any of the serious problems that users point out time and time again, for years and years?

Chrome isn't any better with the developers holier than though attitudes. There have been feature requests that have been very highly voted for they they just keep turning down even though it would be a simple toggle on and off feature that could default to off. One such exam

As a professional developer in the web/services space, I'm using firebug most of the time. I find it most capable of dealing with highly dynamic DOM/css. There are most definitely bugs and issues with it but they aren't deal breakers. It does crash. Some stuff doesn't work. You sometimes get back garbage values. But all that considered, I still find it to be a better debugging tool than either the IE dev tools or chrome's tools. I'll also say that I do use all three toolsets. This isn't an "i only use firebug" fanboy reaction. I live and breath all three, as well as a pile of proprietary internal tools. But as far as debugging highly complex dynamic pages, firebug is my first choice by far.

Well it is rather similar to sticking with Google search because you prefer Google street view in the new higher resolution to M$ offerings.

Reality is there is nothing stopping M$ grabbing that mozilla source creating a M$ branded Firefox and releasing it in parallel in M$ internet explorer as long as they adhere to the conditions of the open source licence.

Folks who love Microsoft products but not IE? People who don't trust Google with their search data but think it's safe with Bing? Who would want this?

I assume that this is for the Mozilla Foundation and they are the ones that want it because MS is paying them for it. MS probably promised them a larger share of the advertising revenue than they were getting from Google.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they should just come out and say it.

Users who prefer a highly customizeable, performant browser in line with FOSS principles, but who are so fickle that they cant be bothered to choose their own search engine?

Come on, I dont use Bing, but its not AWFUL, and it takes all of 3 seconds to switch to google or whatever else you might want. Mozilla needs money, this gets them money, and the cost to users is negligible.

This is for people who may want the browser. We're not talking about the default Firefox version here or anything. Anyone can take Firefox and modify it; the only question is whether the result can be called Firefox. That last bit is the only story here.

I'd say there's a fair number of people who are satisfied or prefer WindowsXP/Windows 7 but use Chrome or Firefox. In fact I think the internal statistics of Microsoft employees places IE usage low. As well as a high penetration of iPhone.

Wow.
Google create a fake query and it showed up on Bing. You and TechLA are a obviously shills. The only people in the tech world that believes google made this up is you

From Google:We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:

Did you actually read the article you linked to? Microsoft denies it, yes, but the article seems to come up with the same conclusion, that they did use Google to get some of their results (obviously, they can't use Google for **all** their results, because they'd lose their #1 ranking for many of their own internet properties, not something that they would want).

Just read the quote from Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, on that very same article you linked to. His denial is so guarded, tangential, and so carefully well-crafted, that it's not telling us anything of what really happened. His failed attempt at obfuscation is pretty damning. If you ask me, he should just have kept his mouth shut.

Try reading what he linked to.. they copy everything, not just Google. So yes, they copy, but not in the way that you allege.

They also auto-correct spelling without notifying you that they've done so, so torsorophy is not a smoking gun. Their honeypot experiment was much better proof of copying. It's not a bad idea for improving search relevancy, but pretty creepy at the same time. Next time I see an MS shill complaining about Google's datamining/privacy policies, I'll have to point this one out.

Oh, ok. So it wasn't the bing search engine taking the results of a google search and putting it into the bing search engine! It was the bing toolbar! How silly to accuse bing of blatant search result theft. They aren't stealing Google's results.... they are just tracking what users click on when they get google results, and putting it into their own search results. Crazy to call that theft, huh? Taking someone else's work, putting it into yours, and then calling it your own.

True, true. The question is, however, who is the 'someone else' and what 'work' are you 'taking' (and yeah, it's not theft - it's not even copyright infringement for that matter).

Let's go with the either pro-Google- or anti-Microsoft-centric view first and say the 'someone else' is Google and the 'work' is the results Google returns when searching for a query. How does Google get those results? Well, from the page domain set up by the domain owner, from the page title set up by

I take it you haven't used Bing lately, probably the only advantage that I see to Google is that Google has more granularity with the bots. In practice, I don't typically notice that results from things I'm looking for are reliable when they're less than a day or two old anyways, as they're frequently unanswered posts or in progress.

When I experimented with Bing, I found that the quality was pretty similar to what Google was offering, by which I mean it sucked just as much. I've since moved over to duckduck